Presented here are material which was all I (Stone Oakvalley) had available to learn about computers from the age of 6 (i.e 1980) and the following years to come. These books and magazines influented and created the man I am today basically concerning my computer fetish. Naturally, I had only a few percent of all these magazines, and its about time for my own sanity to complete this collection - 30+ years later :-)

Some scans (which are from my own collection) are mostly in Norwegian language and available for download as PDF files.

But most of the collection was highly increased during 2014-2016 when several visitors came over my inital web-page and kindly donated more physical magazines to me with the aim of making this the first and *ONLY* complete collection of magazines during an important era in the Commercial Norwegian Computer history!

During 2017, additional collections where either donated, lended or even shipped to me in scanned format (including Amiga and PC floppy disks) for inclusion onto this page. A big thanks to those who support this project - we have created the single most large database in Norway for this type of magazines!

Due to personal nostalgic reasons, the entire 1987-1995 Swedish Datormagazin collection was added to this page during May-September 2017.

SCANNING PROCEDURE

How I do it

There are many ways to scan a magazine, the trick is to find a balance between image quality vs filesize including use of OCR. Most of my scanned material are performed like this (using Adobe Acrobat Pro v9):

What this does is that the page itself represented in pixels are exactly the same as the original physical format (whatever that may be). The OCR enhances the text and makes the entire magazine searchable (where OCR can perform it successfully naturally).

Many others out there seems to go for 600 DPI or higher without any optimizing, resulting in a typical 102 page magazine came down to several hundred megabytes, my version: around 10% of that, with no apparent loss when viewed as 100% on a properly sized screen (yeah, like a A4 Tablet, or a LCD Portrait oriented setup, around 15 to 17 inch).

If you want to zoom, simply take the device closer to your eyes. Don't use software zoom to get closer to pictures in the PDF, which of course will degrade and become pixellated quickly.

SEARCH IN PDF'S

Featuring SOTDS Suite!

As a bonus, and to promote my database project "Stone Oakvalley's Text Database Searcher (SOTDS)", the following package below will enable you to search for any word from any of the Norwegian magazines presented below, in blistering fast and efficient speed!

Runs on any Windows Operating System and uses minimal memory. Simply download ZIP file below, unpack everything where you want, and execute SOTDS_Searcher.exe.

It should be noted that it searches for Direct Match for a single word (no spaces or part of sentences), but features also Partial Match to find other words that matches your initial single word.

Was previously known as "mikrodata (med Hobby-Data)", until issue 4 in 1985.

I got 10 magazines of these, pending scanning only. Further, during 1987 (most likely) they changed name into "PC World Norge" which is still a active magazine in the shops today. Funny enough, Wikipedia says "PC World" first came out in 1984, but my research tells not at this point. Its more likely in 1985, but has to be verified later.

ARTIC NYTT

from Artic Software Club

NORSK DATORMAGAZIN

1988-1989 (Norwegian)

SAM - SVENSKA AMIGAMAGAZIN

1996- ? (Distributed in Norway)

Allthough not a Norwegian magazine, but it was eventually distributed in Norway too by Applause Data.